Investigation of second language readers' awareness and use of first and second language reading strategies indicated that in first language reading "local" reading strategies correlate negatively with reading performance. Local strategies were positively correlated for English first language readers of Spanish, while global strategies were…

A study of factors affecting high school students' language study persistence indicated that students continuing foreign language study were motivated by practical, utilitarian reasons, while students discontinuing language study cited course difficulty and preferences for other courses as reasons for withdrawal. (Author/CB)

Describes variations of three popular games for teaching in the foreign language classroom. "Recycled" games include Bingo, dice-related exercises, and "Pictionary." (CB)

Presents daily activities that facilitate complete sentence response, promote oral production, and aid the learning of vocabulary in foreign-language classes. Because speech is the primary form of communication in the foreign-language classroom, it is important to stimulate students to converse as soon as possible. (Author/CK)

Reflects on the process of "normalization" that is gaining prestige in Majorca (Spain) as it restores Catalan to the role of official language. The outcome of the process of normalization in Spain may positively influence the possible approaches for the newly created multilingual states of post-Soviet Eastern Europe as they seek to…

Describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an electronic mail exchange program between university students in the United States and Spain. The program was implemented to help make a course entitled Peninsular Culture and Civilization more interactive, relevant, and interesting (MDM)

Many sociolinguistic studies validate the importance of the relationship among social variables that satisfactorily explain the correlation between linguistic and social phenomena. The intersection of sex, sociocultural level, and age initiates syntactic change that first appears in the vernacular and progresses to the accepted standard. (52…

An experience-based learning model is reported that helps intermediate and advanced students make the transition from language to literature courses in the context of real-life situations. In the Santa Clara project, students meet practical needs of underserved Hispanic populations while practicing their language skills. (Contains seven…

Cognitive and affective responses to one authentic and three edited texts were examined with four levels of university-level learners of Spanish. Results indicated that all students comprehended significantly more from the authentic passage than from the edited ones and also responded more favorably to the authentic passages. (Contains 47…

Reviews the findings of the 3 research articles in this issue, focusing on Lardiere's claim that only 2 of the 15 Spanish-speakers in her study treated regular and irregular plurals differently. It is argued that Lardiere arrived at this classification arbitrarily. (five references) (MDM)

Reinterprets the question of whether second-language reading is a language problem (linguistic threshold) or a reading problem (linguistic interdependence), using data from a study of 186 adult native English speakers reading in English and Spanish. Results indicated that neither hypothesis is wholly reflective of the second-language reading…

Examines a computer-based corpus that provides the data for a comprehensive investigation of clitic climbing in written and spoken modern Spanish. The results are based on nearly 15,000 tokens with 32 different main verbs from a computer corpus of 3.5 million words from ten countries. Clitic climbing is more common in spoken than in written…

Bilingual case study of infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to 1;10 is used to address whether young bilinguals differentiate between their languages based on language choice. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts were used to construct the child's lexicon and establish that translation…

Discusses the experiences of a Malaysian student studying Spanish as a Second Language in an all-female Irish secondary school, focusing on common difficulties encountered by Asian students of Romance languages. It is argued that the teaching of Romance languages often unfairly presupposes a knowledge of Latin or French on the part of learners.…

Discusses techniques for teaching descriptive adjectives in second-language classrooms that rely on humor to help relieve the stress of learning situations. Specific examples of Spanish adjectives and humorous phrases are provided. (contains two references) (MDM)